Planet maemo: category "feed:5b6612335a9771e9ca6fd2a16b8f165c"

I bought an MSI Wind U130 a few weeks ago and was eagerly waiting for Meego 1.0. Today it got released and you can download it here. Just required writing the downloaded image onto a spare USB stick (I used the Nokia given 2GB microsd and reader from GCDS last year) and booting the netbook with that USB stick. Installation was seamless and worked a charm. All the hardware seems to work fine, bluetooth, wifi, usb etc. Twitter integration with updates on the frontpage is cool. I guess that must be done with libsocialweb. Question is: where is the Facebook and Flickr integration? It also fetches my Google Contacts and my Google calendars for the front screen integration. The IM integration is cool with Google talk, MSN and all the usual suspects there (except Skype). Facebook chat is there but it didn’t manage to login.

The default browser is Chrome (or Chromium depending on which image you download) but of course without WebM support currently. I tried bbc iplayer, which worked nicely and a few other sites.

I noticed a setting: Disable touchpad while typing. That is awesome, the amount of times I have inadvertently moved the mouse cursor while typing is crazily high.

On Friday, we got flumotion to stream vp8/webm live.Details on a previous blog post. On the weekend and today (Monday), I set up a live stream from a TV channel from DVB to output in vp8/vorbis/webm. Details on another previous blog post.

Tonight, I started building packages for Maemo 5 for getting vp8/WebM playback and encoding working on the Nokia N900. After a little work, I got it working such that putting the http url to playbin2 or passing it as a dbus message to the media player will make the N900 play the webm stream. I believe this is the first phone in the wild (outside of On2, Google and their partners) to play any kind of WebM/VP8/Vorbis and definitely the first phone to play a live WebM/VP8/Vorbis stream over http.

Pictures speak louder than words:

The packages needed are on the way to extras-devel, beware of enabling extras-devel in an N900. Packages there have not been QAd. The packages are:

At the end of last week, I put packages for flv and ffmpeg gstreamer plugins into maemo extras-devel for fremantle (the version of Maemo that ships in the N900). With those packages, the N900 can play flv files from youtube and elsewhere but there was no app making use of it except the built in media player which one would have to write a mafw plugin for the different sites. So on Sunday afternoon, after a good round of golf (albeit some really crappy short putts missed) I decided to try and write a youtube browser and player. After 20 minutes (and code to parse youtube stuff borrowed from Canola2), I had a start. It would get the top rated videos list from you tube and display them in a pannable area as a list of buttons. Tapping a button would play the clip with GStreamer’s playbin2.

Then I thought maybe the app could be more useful to others with a little work, I gave the app a name: zoutube. I gave the app a crappy icon (icon designers feel free to contribute a nicer icon) and added debian packaging stuff. I made the app show a list of YouTube’s categories as well as Recently Features, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent as the front screen before it showed the videos. The next features I plan are:

search

show full description

seek bar when playing

download

thumbnail of video

Please try it out, it is in extras-devel if you have it enabled, it will appear as zoutube in the App Manager on your N900 under Internet and Networking. Also feedback welcome and appreciated. Screenshots here (video not in player screenshot because screenshotting on N900 does not show accelerated video overlay):

Yesterday lunchtime I wrote a simple GStreamer app in python to run on the N900 with the video embedded in a widget inside the app. I committed it inside gst-python git inside the folder examples. It just does videotestsrc ! videoscale ! ximagesink. It could have been videotestsrc ! xvimagesink but I wanted to grab a screenshot.

So last week, I started writing a maemo fremantle widget in a few spare pockets of time. One thing got me stuck. I could not get the thing to be transparent. I tried looking at other widgets’ code but just couldn’t figure it out. Finally at the Extending Hildon Desktop BoF yesterday at the Maemo Summit, I got my answer: set the colormap of the window to be 32bit rgba.